Today we are enjoying what I would consider be a very different kind of day. Because of our train ride on the California Zephyr, we ended up in Emeryville, which is just across the Bay bridge from San Francisco nestled between Berkeley and Richmond. I’ve spent very little time in the East Bay, so I took the path of least resistance, which was to book a hotel near the train station. And because our objective in coming to San Francisco was to pay a visit to my friend Frank, who has been shuffling around between home and hospitals, we didn’t really know in advance where exactly we should be for this visit. In Emeryville, being convenient to the station had as much going for it as anything. We also thought we would be leaving from Emeryville to head back down on the train tomorrow, and while that has now changed to a flight back home tomorrow, I had already booked two nights in the Emeryville Hyatt. It used to be that booking.com was the best way to ensure easy cancellation, but now everybody wants to offer rooms priced with and without cancellation capability. That plays directly into my ounce and a half of frugality (something I have in very short supply), so I tend to opt for the cheaper no cancellation pricing, which is what I did with the Emeryville Hyatt. Well, you can negotiate your way out of cancellation fees if the supply and demand is working in your favor, but given how this trip has gone logistically, that was a complication with which I didn’t want to engage. So the plan today was to catch an Uber in San Francisco, spend as much time with Frank as his circumstances would allow, kick around in San Francisco for the day with no particular goals, and then Uber back over the bridge to overnight at the Hyatt, only to Uber yet again back over the bridge in the morning to go to SFO for our flight.
As we got into our Uber this morning, we learned that Frank’s schedule, which is not really at his own discretion, was going to cause us to have a couple hours to kill before being able to see him. No big problem as this was always intended to be a freeform day and we are literally able to do anything anywhere in town that we wanna do. I find that the biggest constraint in San Francisco, besides generally not knowing the town too well and always being confused about my ordinal orientation, is the obvious issue of the hills. Apple Maps does not do a good job of telling me how many mountains I have to climb up or down to go from here to there. In my newer, more svelte configuration, I’m less bothered by the exercise coefficient of the hills then I am about just understanding where and how it’s best to walk or ride. The place that we Ubered to where Frank is currently resident is pretty much at the top of the hill. So Kim and I started walking down the hill towards Union Square. In all fairness, that was Kim’s choice because while she doesn’t know San Francisco much better than I do, she does know that there’s shopping to be had near Union Square, and Kim never met a shopping day she didn’t enjoy.
As we walked down the hilly streets, this way and that, the most notable thing to me was the number of Waymo’s we saw along the way. Waymo is a self-driving technology company that originated as Google’s self-driving car project in 2009, before becoming an independent subsidiary of Alphabet (Google’s parent company) in 2016. Waymo’s vehicles are fully autonomous with no human driver needed. Waymo develops the hardware and software stack for autonomous vehicles, including custom sensors (lidar, radar, cameras) and AI systems that handle all driving tasks. Waymo One, a robotaxi service currently operating in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Phoenix, is available through an app like Uber. The cars use a combination of lidar, radar, and cameras to build a real-time 3D map of their surroundings, combined with pre-mapped road data and AI to navigate traffic, pedestrians, and road conditions without human input. I watched this Waymo phenomenon at the intersections and will note that it seems to do a very good job of recognizing when pedestrians are crossing and thereby holding back accordingly. But I will admit it is very strange watching a Waymo sit patiently while it’s passengers look out the window and pedestrians like me wonder whether or not it’s smart enough to keep from running into them. I’m guessing that we should trust Waymo not to harm us more than we should trust most humans, who can both be distracted and driven by untoward emotions. In any case, there are Waymo’s all over the place on these hills and it’s all very interesting to watch.
So right now, I am sitting in Union Square watching people play cornhole, badminton, foosball, and ping-pong on public access game tables. These people are multicultural regular folks, probably some residents and some tourists, but everyone seems to be having a perfectly pleasant time while the Waymo’s run around doing the heavy lifting of taxi driving. Maybe that’s an AI vision of the future. Soon we will go back to see Frank and when that is at its end (we want to spend as much time with him as he has available), we will find something else to wander around and do in this city by the bay before we have to head back across that bay into the workaday world of Emeryville. It’s very unusual to have a day like today because we literally have no agenda, we’re out of our element, we were surrounded by technology and multicultural liberalism and for at least a few more hours the world is our oyster.
After a pleasant two regaling Frank with all our stories and giving him our best wishes for speedy recovery, we went back to Union Square and decided to jump on the Hop-On-Hop-Off double-decker open-topped Big Bus to ride around the City. That was a great concept that got less great by the minute as the hard plastic seats started to leave their imprint on my spine and Kim’s tail bone. We made it past Fisherman’s Wharf and Ghiradelli Square, but when we got to the Palace of Fine Arts, we bailed out, having at least seen the Golden Gate in the distance. The Palace of Fine Arts is in San Francisco’s Marina District and is one of the most iconic and photogenic structures in the city. It was built for the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition, which celebrated the completion of the Panama Canal and San Francisco’s recovery from the 1906 earthquake. Bernard Maybeck designed it in a romantic, Greco-Roman ruin aesthetic, intentionally meant to evoke melancholy and the passage of time, which was unusual for exposition architecture of the era. The rotunda and colonnade surround a lagoon, and the reflections on the water are a large part of the visual effect Maybeck intended. The decorative panels feature weeping women turning away from the arts , his interpretation of the tragedy of life without beauty. Unlike most exposition buildings, which were demolished after 1915, the Palace was left standing because the public loved it too much to tear it down. The original structure was built from temporary materials (wood, burlap, plaster) and slowly deteriorated over decades. A full concrete reconstruction was completed in 1965, and a seismic retrofit and restoration followed in 2009. The theater inside hosts performances and private events. And most importantly, it got us off the damn bus.
We then Ubered our way back across the City and the Bay to our Emeryville hideaway. It was, overall, a great day on the Bay.